I met Patrick Meier at last week’s Twitter Chirp Conference and was immediately intrigued by his card, which read: Ushahidi, Crowdsourcing Crisis Information. Ushahidi means “testimony” in Swahili. The platform, which is completely free and open, was initially developed in early 2008 during Kenya’s post election fallout as a way to map reports of violence.

“We threw up a Google map of Kenya,” says Meier. “We got a short code 6007 with Safaricom (a Kenyan mobile operator), which meant that anyone in Kenya could text in their observation saying I just saw a riot, I just saw a person getting beating up and then we’d be able to geo-locate that and have a completely transparent map that anyone could access and see what was happening.”

After seeing the traffic grow to 45,000 users from Kenya alone, they knew they were onto something.

Come January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti. Within 48 hours of the earthquake, Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic and Katie Stanton of the U.S. State Department convinced DigiCel, the largest telco in Haiti, set up a short code – 4636 – (much like our 911) that people could text for help. Anyone in Haiti could text their urgent life and death situation with their location, and Ushahidi would map that information.

Read more at:  http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504464_162-20003126-504464.html